16/03/2011

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (Mark Leckey, UK, 1999, 14') uses found and original footage of parties held across Britain during the 70s, 80s and 90s, from northern soul clubs to acid house raves. Details of clothing, technology, music and other cultural references surface briefly like uncanny folklore as the film explores a culture of collective leisure and consumption. Writing about Leckey’s first few video pieces, which in addition to Fiorucci… include We Are (Untitled) (2000) and Parade (2003), the art critic Catherine Wood said that they “represent the human subject striving to spread itself out into a reduced dimensionality. His subjects dance, take drugs and dress up in their attempts to transcend the obstinate physicality of the body and disappear in abstract identification with the ecstasy of music, or the seamlessness of the image". The video is sound-tracked by the artist's own music.

From Artforum: A documentary of sorts, Leckey's video chronicles the rites of passage experienced by successive generations of British (sub)urban youth. While obviously celebratory, Fiorucci is ultimately concerned with a collective loss of innocence; its subtext, an examination of the ritualistic behavior of heterosexuals on the threshold of adulthood. Leckey's young--ostensibly male--protagonists exist in the tungsten glare of the moment, blissfully unaware of (their) culture's inevitable passing. As one musical genre succeeds the next, so too are fashions consigned to the dustbin of history. Fiorucci revels in its detail: At one point an authoritarian voice-over intones a list of the once-prized sportswear brands favored by Britain's "casuals" (those elite tribes of mid-'80s football hooligans): Ellesse, Cerrutti, Sergio Tacchini, Lacoste, Fila, Kappa, Jordache, Fiorucci, each specific to a particular time and a particular team's supporters.